It is with some reluctance that I express my disappointment with Roméo Dallaire.  After all, Dallaire was the Canadian Lieutenant General who had the unenviable task of heading up the ill fated UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in 1994.  When all was said and done, 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered at the hands of Hutus in 100 days.   

Over a decade after the fact, Dallaire bears the scars of having witnessed mankind at its very, very worst.  He suffered post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and in April 2000, Dallaire was forced out of the Canadian military for medical reasons.  It was around this time that Dallaire attempted suicide by drinking himself to death on a park bench in Ottawa while on anti-depression medication.   

However, Dallaire has slowly re-emerged back into the public limelight.  In 2003, Dallaire wrote a book about his experiences in Rwanda titled Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.  Later, a documentary based on the book was produced and won an award at the Sundance Film Festival.   During the 2004-2005 academic year, he was a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.  In March of this year, Dallaire was appointed to Canada’s Senate by Prime Minister Paul Martin.    

In a recent appearance at a book store in Cambridge’s Porter Square just up the road from Harvard University, Dallaire stated that his original manuscript for Shake Hands with the Devil was 4000 pages.  His account of the first 24 hours of the Rwandan massacre alone ran 274 pages.  Dallaire said that he did not set out to write the book for therapeutic purposes, although he has concluded that writing the book has indeed been a therapeutic experience.

Still, all the accolades will never entirely excise Dallaire’s anger.   Yet surprisingly, Dallaire directs very little of his anger towards the United Nations.  After all, it was the UN that failed to act on Dallaire’s information that the Hutus were planning a mass slaughter of Tutsis.  More importantly, Dallaire had information as to where the Hutus were hiding their weapons and had troops on the ground to thwart the impending genocide.  Yet Dallaire was ordered by the Director of UN Peacekeeping Operations not to intervene.  The man who told him not to intervene was none other than Kofi Annan.

Yet Kofi Annan gets a virtual complete pass from Dallaire.  Annan is mentioned only very briefly in Shake Hands with the Devil but Dallaire looks upon Annan as if he had just delivered the sermon on the mount.  Take this excerpt from page 50:

Or consider this even more glowing passage on page 92:

I am surprised Annan hasn’t hired Dallaire to be his speechwriter to handle the Oil for Food scandal.

At the very minimum, one could describe Dallaire’s disposition towards Annan and the UN as charitable.  In fact, during the Q & A, an elderly man used that exact word to describe Dallaire’s perspective on the United Nations.  Needless to say, Dallaire was not amused by this man’s observation.  

Dallaire chastised the man by stating that the UN is “ineffective as sovereign states want it to be.”  He claimed the Annan was “begging” for a peacekeeping force and that only an ill-equipped army from Ethiopia answered the call six weeks after the genocide began.

While Dallaire acknowledged that then UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali was “in charge,” Dallaire reserved most of the blame for the Rwandan massacre on the United States, France and Belgium, and stated that the UN was “a scapegoat” in the whole affair.  

To be fair, Dallaire is certainly right to take these governments to task.  The United States had been shell-shocked by the killing of 18 Army Rangers in Mogadishu the previous year, and Madelaine Albright had made it clear that U.S. troops would not get involved because it did not serve American “self-interest.”  It is worth noting that at the time of the genocide in Rwanda, Democrats controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress.  The French and Belgian governments certainly deserved criticism as their governments, especially the French, had sympathies with the Hutus.   

But Dallaire spent much of his time criticizing the United States, especially its decision to intervene in the former Yugoslavia the following year.  Dallaire made the bizarre speculation that the United States was more inclined to intervene on behalf of white people than black people.  Again, the United States deserved its share of criticism in the Rwandan tragedy.  But like many UN apologists, Dallaire does not acknowledge any fault with the UN.   In fact, Dallaire has often said (and said again that evening) that the UN was the only “impartial and transparent international body in the world.”

With that in mind, I posed a question to Dallaire.  After congratulating him on his appointment to the Senate, I told him a few months ago that I had spoken to Dore Gold, the former Israeli Ambassador to the UN.  Gold argues that the UN’s “impartiality” has rendered it unable to distinguish between oppressors and victims, citing Rwanda amongst many examples.  I then pointed out that Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe sit in judgment of the conduct of other governments on the Commission of Human Rights.   Indeed, Zimbabwe’s membership has just been renewed on the Commission for another three years.  I pointed out that UN peacekeepers have raped young girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo in exchange for food.  I further pointed out that the UN General Assembly calls emergency sessions on the State of Israel, yet did not do so in the case of Rwanda.  Given these facts, I asked Dallaire,  “Why should the United States or any other member state have confidence in the UN?”

Dallaire angrily replied,  “What’s your solution?   What would you do?”

Of course, Dallaire wasn’t interested in my thoughts on the matter.  He went on to say that you can’t “blast your way in” to solve problems.  He chided countries (re: the United States) that operated on their own or outside the UN system by saying, “Don’t bring in your own baggage.”  Dallaire said that international matters were best left to “middle powers with no baggage.”  Whatever that meant.  Of course, with that logic, one wonders if Dallaire would have opposed the No Fly Zone set up by the Americans and British in Iraq after the Gulf War to protect the Kurds and Shiites after the UN had failed to address the matter?

Dallaire then went on to criticize the United States for mobilizing when 3,000 people were killed in New York City, but doing nothing when 800,000 were killed in Rwanda.  He chided the United States for acting in self-interest rather than for the sake of humanity.  So let me get this straight.  Because the United States did not send troops to Rwanda, it ought not to have responded to the attacks of September 11th?  Dallaire may decry self interest, but to quote Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself then who is for me?”

If that was not enough, Dallaire further chided the United States for “stomping on civil liberties” and “throwing away Conventions.”  Dallaire said the United States should invest in international development rather than in security and defense.  He said this as if such matters were mutually exclusive of each other.   

Never mind that the United States has committed $15 billion to combat AIDS on the African continent, has lent a helping hand during Liberia’s civil war and is virtually alone in the world in recognizing the slaughter in Sudan as a genocide.  If Dallaire has nothing good to say about the Clinton Administration, he certainly cannot say anything good about President Bush.

Dallaire’s wrapping himself around the UN flag and knee jerk anti-Americanism was certainly well received in the People’s Republic of Cambridge.  No doubt the same will be true when he returns to Ottawa to carry out his Senatorial duties three days a week in the Red Chamber.  But in so doing I must express my disappointment in Dallaire.  For all his courage, nobility and struggle to maintain his sanity, he has become part of the problem and not part of the solution.   

So what is my solution?  Of course, I have no illusions that I have a solution.  But I do have some suggestions.  To begin, find a new Secretary General.  While Dallaire insisted that there were forces that were trying to get rid of Annan at the time when he is trying to reform the UN, he did not mention the small matter of the UN Oil for Food Scandal.  Annan cannot declare himself exonerated when the man investigating the scandal, Paul Volcker, states otherwise.   The UN cannot inspire confidence when its leading figure helped to perpetuate one of the world’s worst dictatorships.  After all, Annan considered Saddam Hussein a man with whom he could do business.  And that he did.

Of course, Annan’s departure is only a start.  After all, if Annan is succeeded by someone like former Malaysian President Mohammed Mahatir then we truly have gone one step forward and two steps back.  We need a Secretary General committed in word and in deed not only to the founding principles of the UN but the values of the people who founded it at the end of WWII.

If human rights are to mean anything one cannot have Sudan in a position to pass judgment on anyone.  The presence of a country that has killed 2 million of its own people mocks the very idea of human rights.  Sudan, Zimbabwe and Cuba and other states must be removed from their posts on the Commission on Human Rights, if not from the UN altogether.  The UN must set some standards and live by them.

The UN must learn to distinguish between victims and aggressors.  It is one thing to be impartial.  It is another to be impaired.  The UN, as presently constituted, cannot distinguish between Hutus using machetes and the Tutsis hacked to death by them.  In Sudan, the UN cannot distinguish between Muslims who enslave Black Christians and Black Christians who are enslaved by Arab Muslims.  The UN cannot distinguish Israelis killed by suicide bombers and Palestinian suicide bombers who kill Israelis and anyone else in their path.  The UN considers the tactic of suicide bombing a legitimate means of “resistance.”  It is one thing to resist dictatorial rule, it is another to deliberately kill innocent civilians in the name of resistance.  With that in mind, the UN cannot have one refugee agency for Palestinians and another for the rest of the world.

The UN can provide food, medical and other humanitarian assistance.  But it does not inspire confidence when it cuts and runs as it did in Iraq when UN headquarters in Baghdad were bombed.   It must stay the course and not abandon people in their greatest need.

The UN must be able to enforce its own Security Council resolutions.  No wonder Saddam Hussein didn’t take the UN seriously.  The Security Council had passed 16 resolutions concerning Saddam’s violations of the Gulf War Ceasefire before they passed Resolution 1441 in late 2003 warning of “serious consequences.”  Saddam had no reason to take the 17th resolution any more seriously than the first or the sixteenth except for the fact that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were prepared to enforce it.  If not for the liberation of Iraq, UN Security Council resolutions are about as useful as the resolutions drafted by the People’s Front of Judea (not to be confused with the Judean People’s Front) in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

In a variation on George Orwell, Dallaire asked, “Are some humans more human than other humans?"  Then Dallaire answers, “All humans are humans.”  If Dallaire believes that the UN embodies the spirit that “all humans are human,” consider the actions of Iqbal Riza, who was Annan’s deputy in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations.  Riza told Dallaire that he could rescue foreign nationals but could not rescue Rwandans.  To be precise, his instructions were, “No Locals.”   So how is it that Dallaire can put his faith in the UN, when the UN itself does not believe that all humans are human?  All human, indeed.

Aaron Goldstein, a former member of the socialist New Democratic Party, writes poetry and has a chapbook titled Oysters and the Newborn Child: Melancholy and Dead Musicians. His poetry can be viewed on www.poetsforthewar.org.